Yea I'm sure the manager who probably makes 10 an hour can just start giving people raises at will. How aggravating indeed.
And even if the manager was earning a low amount there's no reason that in just one year out of those 10 he could not have given him a Christmas bonus. Even a small amount, so that Mr. Smith would not have been able to say that he "never got a [...] Christmas bonus."
"I kind of forced him" to celebrate holidays, Rogers said.
That quote kind of puts a different perspective on it. His roommate had to force holidays on him, so is it a wonder his manager didn't give him cards? Maybe that's just the way he came off.
"He might not have meant something to somebody else, but he was like family to us. He meant something to us." - Dayhoff, his boss at Crab Shack. That sounds like he appreciated him to me. Quit acting like you guys care about Neil Smith more than his no-wage-raising, no-bonus-giving, no-card-giving manager. That guy actually lost somebody, you guys didn't. So don't be so quick to call him uncaring.
Celebrating holidays or not is a completely separate issue.
Even if he wasn't earning much more than 8 or 9 dollars an hour even then, but it probably would mean quite a bit for someone in that situation.
With inflation, he was actually being paid less 10 years later.
Did he deserve it? Maybe, the article mentioned he started out as a waiter and (moved up?) to dishwasher. Maybe dishwasher paid more, who knows. But my whole point is a manager in a restaurant has less control over raises than you seem to suggest.
I think it was the roommate, Rogers, who had been a waiter.
I looked this up and Neil Alan Smith's wages grew by 41% from 2001 to 2010, outpacing inflation of 23%.
Inflation from Aug. 2001 to Aug. 2010 increased prices by 23% (http://inflationdata.com/inflation/inflation_Rate/historical...).
Neil Alan Smith's wages started in 2001 at the federal minimum wage of $5.15. The federal minimum wage was constant from 1997 to 2007, but Florida passed a minimum wage law increasing its state minimum wage to $6.15 in 2005. Other adjustments to the Florida minimum wage increased his wage to $7.25 by 2010. (http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_Florida_minimum_wage_histo... and http://www.floridajobs.org/minimumwage/index.htm)
However, sometimes available finances simply do not warrant a raise. Sometimes higher management who does not know an employee says "why should we pay him more, we can just find another Joe to do the same job", without knowing the measure of the man.
Why don't these companies give raises? The same reason Wal-Mart fights viciously to stop unionization; because higher-pay means higher-prices which for bottom-of-the-barrel pricing means less sales. I can buy a burger at McDonalds for a dollar; I have to shop like a pro to find the deals to get burger buns and burgers, cheese slices, pickles, ketchup/relish/etc at a comparable price to make an identical burger. Likely I'll end up spending at least $2 to make my own burger.
McDonalds is making profit off of a food item that costs less than $1. Looking at the economics of it, it's ridiculous. How many burgers in my lifetime would I have to make to equalize the cost of using electricity/gas to heat my stove top to fry a burger, and buying the frying pan in the first place, and the bun, burger, cheese, condiments.
Not giving a raise helps keep these people in a job, it's sad that it has to be this way (for more reasons than one), but thats what this world is. Although to look in the back of most McDonalds if you found one competent worker like Mr. Smith you could fire half of your day-staff. I've seen 3 good workers turn out orders faster than when every station is full and there's 20 workers in a store, because when there's a lot of them they're inevitably students and the managers are like 19 and endlessly chatter.